


the shadow that the desert knows

by skitzofreak



Series: The Holonet Is A Wild Place [3]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, City of the dead gods, F/M, Gangs, Heist, Prompt Fill, Some droid rights snuck in here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-15
Updated: 2018-11-15
Packaged: 2019-08-24 03:38:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16632182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skitzofreak/pseuds/skitzofreak
Summary: On the fourth day of the Korriban job, a job that should have been smooth as Chandrila butter, Jyn decided that she hated him.--In the City of The Dead Gods, Jyn is hunting a thief.





	the shadow that the desert knows

**Author's Note:**

> For @oziahmidwinter, who sent me this prompt:
> 
> “I could have said something, but I didn’t, and you know why? Because I am not a mean person, that’s why.”

On the fourth day of the Korriban job, a job that _should_ have been smooth as Chandrila butter, Jyn decided that she hated him.

Or her. Them? She wasn’t completely sure who “Greer” actually was, because no matter how many gangsters she beat up, no matter how many consoles she hacked or pockets she picked, she could never get any more information than: Human, dark hair, goes by Greer. The guy (or girl, or other, or whomst-the-fuck- _ever_ ) moved through the City of The Dead Gods like smoke, leaving barely any trace at all.

And yet, when Jyn arrived in the giant, toppled statues that had been converted into a seething city in the middle of this forsaken desert on Korriban, Jyn found that Greer had already been there before her. The Holdberdt gang who operated in the East Arm of The Shattered God Iru were supposed to have a vault deep in the Arm, somewhere around the elbow, full to the brim of old treasures from the long-dead Korriban Protectorate. Jyn, a little down on her luck at the moment but not yet desperate, bought the vault schematics on the darknet (the vault turned out to be a Cision 113 Mark 8 vault door, an expensive triple-coded rig out used by several governments and a few private investors – child’s play) and flew out to the ass-end of nowhere to crack it.

When she rappelled from the knuckle of the East Arm to hang outside the window of Ezeka Holdberdt’s office in the dead of the night cycle, she found the damn place crawling with furious gangsters, all slapping the floor with their broad tails and hissing as Holdberdt themself glowered at a wide open, swinging vault door. “Greer!” One of the gangsters nearest the window grated harshly between sharp teeth. “It had to be Greer, Boss. Had to be. Told you, _told you,_ never trust a Human!”

Holdberdt shot the admonisher through the eye on the spot. “Greer went back on his word!” Xe shrieked, as their lackeys scattered around xir. “Find me the Human _kiulud!_ Find! Now!”

That was day one.

Jyn, irritated but not deterred, went down to the Heart Markets of the Weeping God Hossien, and spent a frustrating morning bartering in backrooms with nervous merchants and shifty gang informants. Greer, she was told, was a newcomer to the City of Dead Gods. They had been here a month, or a week, or possibly a season. They were a hit man for one of the gangs, or a smuggler with high-end loot, or some kind of recruiter.

Recruiter for what?

“A new gang,” murmured an agent for the Holy Whisperers of the Weeping God’s Left Ear.

“A black ops squad for the Empire,” growled a merchant wearing the colors of the Kneecap Dweller Gang.

“She’s a damn thief, nothing more,” hissed a bruised Human carrying a slaver’s whip. “Stole my whole shipment, ran off into the fecking Bowels. Hey, hey, kid, if you find Greer, I’ll pay you good credit if you bring her to me, alive.”

Jyn broke his nose, stole his scandocs for good measure, and used his identity to buy herself a meal and a few more tidbits of information around the Markets. The only thing that turned out to be remotely useful was a tip-off from a jittery Devaronian that sent her down to the Spine of the Screaming God Koo. Greer was rumored to be picking up a shipment of droid parts meant for the Empire – or stealing them, or selling them to the Empire, the story on that wasn’t any clearer than Greer’s identity. Didn’t really matter. This person had Jyn’s loot. She was going to get it back. (Alright, technically not yet _her_ loot; but it was the loot she needed, because there wasn’t much else on this rock that was worth the cost of the vault schematic and the ticket out here. If she wanted to eat this month, she needed that junk. Unless she wanted to get involved in the underground Sith artifact trade, but word was all that shit went straight to Vader on Coruscant, and there was no kriffing way Jyn was getting near any of _that_ nonsense. No kriffing way.)

It was a hell of a hike up to Koo’s Spine from Hossein’s Heart, but the Devaronian said that Greer would be in the warehouse district of the Spine by third moonrise, and probably gone again by fourth moonrise. That left her a very narrow window to get in, find the asshole, get her stuff, and get out. So Jyn grit her teeth and booked it through the ridiculously inefficient street layout of the Dead Gods, up the giant torso of one red stone giant and down the half-crumbled shoulder of another, shoving through tightly packed crowds and jumping over crackling tram tracks (the lumbering public trams here used truly insane paths, zigzagging through the jumble of massive body parts and occasionally grinding out into the open, barren sands between limbs; it took hours to get anywhere on them, and Jyn was in a hurry). 

By the time she showed up at the Spine, the warehouse district was on fire.

Jyn stood in the middle of the sloped street and stared at the burning stone. A terrified Rodian bowled into her, and she barely managed to stop her reflexive punch to his gut at the last second. “He blew up the cargo tram!” he bellowed in her face as she staggered and grabbed him by the shirt front with one hand, tugging her vibroblade free in the other hand out of habit. The Rodian clutched at her shoulders, his blue skin ashen and his breathing ragged. “He blew it up! Shit! All of it! _Boom!_ ”

Her vibroblade hovered an inch from the Rodian’s sternum, but the hysterical idiot didn’t even seem to notice. “Who?” She demanded, more out of general frustration than actual expectation of a reply.

Which was why it shocked her so much when the Rodian actually did answer. “Had to be Greer!” He shook his head, his blue fingers digging hard into Jyn’s shoulders. “That seas-fucked Human! Boss hired him to guard the shipment, not blow it the fuck up!” His giant eyes seemed to somehow grow even wider. “Oh crushing deeps, that stuff was for the Empire. They are gonna be so mad! _So mad!_ It’s just – it’s – _boom!_ I gotta – I gotta go! I gotta hide!”

“Wait,” Jyn snarled as the Rodian shoved her backwards, scrambling to escape. “No, wait a damn – who the fuck is – _hey!_ ” Her foot caught on a piece of rubble in the street, and the Rodian’s wild struggles threw her off-balance. With a shout, Jyn slammed to the rough ground, smoldering rubble pressing into her back. She snapped back to her feet, slapping at her clothes to knock away the hot pebbles and possible fire hazards from her skin. _“Your teeth to grow inwards and chew on your nervous system,_ ” she growled in Huttese, but the Rodian was already gone, vanished into the frightened crowd that was thundering down the Spine. In the distance, loud sirens announced the slow but inevitable arrival of what passed for a fire response service in the Dead Gods.

“Alright?”

She whipped around, vibroblade raised, but the speaker merely stepped back, his hands palm out in a peaceable gesture. “No offense,” he said softly, standing very still. “No threat.”

Jyn eyed him, but he didn’t make any attempt to move closer, kept his empty hands within her line of sight. He was Human, male-presenting, taller than her, looked lean at a glance but his clothes were dark and clearly designed to hide his actual proportions, and if she had to guess from his accent, he wasn’t a local. There was something very…intense about the way he looked at her face, like he was committing it to memory, like he was searching for something.

Jyn narrowed her eyes. “What’s it to you?”

The stranger shrugged, his body language relaxed and disinterested, but his eyes were still too focused, too sharp as he looked at her. “Just asking. You went down hard. Thought you might have cracked your head on the street.”

“No,” she snapped. “Fuck off.”

He raised his eyebrows, then shoved his hands into the pockets of his dark jacket. “Have a good night,” he said blandly, and started to walk away, down the nearly-empty street in the direction that the rest of the crowd had fled.

Behind him, the warehouse where Greer was supposedly meeting some smuggler gang exploded again, taking out a chunk of the thick wall behind it. The heavy red stone caved in with a deafening crash, revealing a sliver of the cold night sky outside. With a jolt, Jyn realized that the fire had been powerful enough to literally break through the ancient shell of the Screaming God’s exterior wall. That was…that was a hell of a blast. Greer must have really, really not wanted the Empire to get these droid parts.

Something in Jyn’s brain clicked. Wait a fucking second.

Who the hells walked casually away from an explosion that size? The person who set it, that’s who.

Human.

Dark hair.

_Shit!_

“Hey!” Jyn turned sharply on her heel and bolted down the street. “Hey, you!”

She skid a little in the rubble as she rounded the corner.

Nothing. The stranger was gone.

She hadn’t even gotten a really good look at his face, too much smoke from the fire, the street lights all blown out. Short, dark beard, she reminded herself, feverishly trying to cement all the details she could recall in her memory even as she darted down the Spine and cut into some of the winding alleys that led to the slums. Behind her, the sirens wailed closer, but finally faded as she traveled deeper and deeper into the cramped, lightless, foul-smelling Southern Torso District (the name was a cheap trick by the Korriban Tourist Board; the locals just called it The Bowels).  

Human, age anywhere from early twenties to late forties, dark hair, scruffy beard, not a local accent. That wasn’t much. Barely more than she had before.

Some jackass with a slaver’s whip and a uniform that looked vaguely familiar lunged for her in the alley. Jyn smashed her truncheon into his throat, grabbed him by the hair on the back of his head and slammed her knee up into his gut once, twice for good measure, and then dropped him to a whimpering heap in the filth of the alley. The slaver from the Heart Markets wore a uniform like that, she thought distantly as she wound her way through the alley and back out into the equally dark but wider streets of The Bowels. He must have been pissed about his stolen scandocs. Or his broken nose. Whatever. She had real problems – someone was hijacking her shit and then vanishing into the smoke of the blown-up buildings in his wake. She needed to find out why.

No, wait, scratch that. She didn’t care _why_. It didn’t concern her. What concerned her was the job, and the credits she needed to get from it. He was screwing with her job. That was banthashit, and she wasn’t about to let it go.

So. Dark hair, scruffy jawline, soft-spoken. Definitely a blaster in his jacket on the left side, possibly a blade of some kind in his right boot. Moved quietly and with confidence through a rough neighborhood, so probably good at using both. Obviously good with explosives, too. Damn, what if he blew up her loot like he’d blown up that droid shipment? Did he burn the warehouse down because he hated droids, or because he hated the Empire, or because he just hated that specific smuggling operation? Was that guy in the street even really Greer, or just someone who didn’t get worked up about massive explosions? Why did he bother to stop and ask if she was alright?

More importantly, where the hells did he go?

That was day two.

Jyn’s next move was to break into the Office of the Governor, a grand building set in a graceful curve in the inside of the highest point in the whole City of Dead Gods – the Head of the Raging God Zaim. The giant’s open mouth bared his massive stone teeth at the sky, allowing the brutal desert sun to pour down and illuminate the serene white stone of the Governor’s Palace built into the curve of the Head just over the official Office of the Governor. Jyn snorted when she noted how the Palace was larger, brighter, and both physically and symbolically higher than the Office, and most importantly, had twice as many Imperial Banners hanging from every window and balcony. Typical.

Fortunately for Jyn, the placing of the Palace meant that it blocked half the sunlight streaming through the Mouth before it hit the Office, and made it that much easier for her to slip close and break in through a servant’s entrance near Zaim’s Neck. The city’s registry archives weren’t too far inward; she only had to bribe one Imperial guard and knock out another to get into the server rooms and access the records for every ship that landed in the Dead Gods.

It took her about an hour to sift through the massive archive and find Greer’s name and registry. He’d come into the city on a U-Wing registered to a small-time trading company. Obviously fake registration, though it had fooled the city scanners handily enough. His scandocs labelled him as a good tax-paying citizen of the Empire who lived on the trading moon Wassahk, worked for the company who registered his ship, was a member of his local gym, owner of a small house in the suburbs, a grav car and a, _hah,_ a kriffing dog. A perfectly normal, perfectly bland, perfectly fake person.

His listed reason for being in the City of Dead Gods: “searching for valuable trade opportunities to advance company interests.” What, was that code for “steal all of Jyn’s shit and lead her on a merry chase around the Gods?” Well, no, probably not (fuck, she hoped not), but it was definitely not the truth either. He was here with some specific purpose in mind. He was screwing with way too many powerful gangs in this city to just be playing around.

Also, she was a bit loathe to admit it, but something about his face in the street, about the intent way he had looked at her, the calm way he had walked into the night…no, she had a gut feeling he wasn’t the kind of person who just liked causing chaos and tempting danger for the thrill of it. He was focused on something. He was here for _something_.

…and his scandocs had just pinged at a Stormtrooper checkpoint in the Heart of the Weeping God Hossein.

Jyn hesitated, then flipped open her datapad and downloaded everything the archive had on Greer. While the files copied, she injected a corruption virus into the server, so that Greer’s data would be riddled with holes and errors but would still show up in the database if someone searched him. The government here would be able to prove that someone with his scandocs had been here, but any details about time or place or the person himself would be lost. Him, and about three thousand other random civilians stored in that system. Let the pompous rich dick-head Governor in his fancy palace work through _that_ administrative headache.

She hustled through Zaim’s Neck and down into the South Arm. It would take her the rest of the day to get to Hossein’s Heart if she walked, so she ground her teeth and boarded the tram running from the South Arm, a jolting two hour ride through stone streets and then strung on an electrified rail over the desert sands between the two statues. A Wookiee stood next to her on the tram, taking up far too much space and making her feel small and trapped in the corner of the swaying tram car. She pressed her side hard against the cold glass wall and glowered down at the red-gold sands several hundred meters below. Something that looked vaguely like a purple and red caterpillar scrunched along the desert floor. Jyn squinted at it – was that a _k’lor’slug?_ Shit on a cracker, if it looked that big from all the way up here, it must be kriffing massive. It could swallow this whole tram car down it’s toothy maw in one bite.

The tram shuddered and jolted, and what a moment ago had felt like a crawling pace suddenly seemed way too fast and reckless. Jyn wrapped her arms tight around her chest and tore her eyes from the certain death below. The tram operator cabin was nearby, and she distracted herself by peering over the conductor’s shoulder and picking out the labels on the various controls. Throttle, brakes, emergency passenger ejection -

Wait, what?

Her fingers bit into her arms. This city, she thought, as the tram groaned and rattled into an opening on the curve of Hossein’s Chest, was a fucking _menace_. And if it weren’t for Greer, or whoever the hells he really was, she would have been gone days ago.

When the tram finally offloaded onto the platform near the Heart Markets, Jyn let herself lean against the stone walls of the station for a moment to breathe, grateful it was over.

Then she went hunting.

It cost her another chunk of credits to find out that Greer had been doing a little hunting of his own. Every merchant and vendor she could bribe into talking to her mentioned someone of his description also paying them to answer a lot of questions about the local gang structures, who ran what turf, the kind of junk they smuggled or sold. He seemed particularly interested in the Metacarpal Mechs, a gang that ran out of the clawed Right Hand of the Raging God Zaim. The Mechs recruited (or enslaved) engineers and techs, and ran droid chop shops all over the Dead Gods. But they were headquartered in the Right Hand of Zaim, and that, it seemed, was where Greer was headed next.

With extreme reluctance (but not much choice), Jyn boarded the dangling tram line that would carry her back across the gap between the god statues. No Wookiee stuffed into the compartment next to her this time, but a dozen chittering Lexlar crowded in after she boarded, arguing and shoving at one another. Jyn pulled her knees up to her chest on her seat, and made a point of flashing her vibroblade at the nearest Lexlar. The little hairy being whined, then snarled at the other Lexlar in his group, and the idiots kept up their personal argument but left her in peace for the rest of the long, painful ride.

Jyn kept her eyes firmly off the desert floor below and her thoughts just as firmly focused on her mark.

This Greer guy definitely has some kind of problem with droids. Blowing up a shipment of droids for the Empire could have meant a lot of things, but going after a droid chop operation? Although, maybe it was less about the droids and more about the people exploiting their parts? And how did the Holdberdt vault theft factor into all this? Damnit, it didn’t matter. She didn’t care. Greer had her stuff, and she was going to get it, come hell or high wind.

But still. Jyn was tired of chasing this asshole all over the city.

When she arrived in the Right Hand of Zaim to find Stormtroopers swarming over the flaming wreckage of what was apparently once a large mechanical workshop, she was thoroughly _sick_ of it.

She slunk close to a couple of the ‘troopers standing guard over the “crime scene,” her scarf up and her face down, blending into the crowd of murmuring onlookers. Once she was close enough, she activated a short-range slicing program that cut into the Imperials’ comm channel. At least she could get an idea of what the hells happened here.

“- two whole levels of unregistered electronic workshops underneath the main building, sir,” some ‘trooper buzzed in her ear. “Central confirms; the top level was a licensed business, the bottom two were illegal operations.”

“Droid chop shops,” another ‘trooper sneered back. “Probably blown up by a rival gang. I want a full sweep of the Right Hand, and initiate double shifts until further notice. I am not interested in dealing with a turf war. Reduce curfew by an hour and take command of all local traffic and security cameras. If any citizen so much as sticks a digit out their door past curfew, I want them arrested. We must set an example for the gangs. We will not tolerate this chaos.”

“Understood, sir. We are currently searching for the arsonist. Initial investigation shows a Human rapidly exiting the building right before the fire surge.”

“Facial analysis?”

“Cameras never got a good angle on them. Tall. Dark hair. Indeterminate age. Scandoc data from the nearest security camera he or she passed was…uh, looks like it was corrupted, sir.”

“Damn. Put out an alert anyway. And make sure any salvage from the fire gets shipped direct to Central. It might be valuable. To the investigation.”

 _Yeah,_ Jyn rolled her eyes and slipped back through the crowd. _To the investigation. Sure._

Jyn glanced at the security camera posted high over the nearest streetlight, watching the little red light on the side stutter and blink out as she passed, only to snap back on when she was out of range. She’d corrupted Greer’s data in the Office of the Governor, but the security cameras down here in the streets would still have scanned him normally. If his information came back corrupted from the camera, then Greer had some kind of program running on his ident chip. Jyn had something similar on her own scandocs, of course, although hers simply powered down the camera temporarily when it tried to scan her. If Greer had the kind of precautionary tech that could directly interface with the camera network’s short-term memory caches, he was definitely a professional. And as good with tech as he was with fire. So yeah, okay, color her impressed.

On the other hand, she had just spent the entire day chasing around the city, dangling over a huge drop with a carnivorous worm at the bottom, haggling for expensive information that drove her right back across the chasm to find that Greer had left her with…nothing. No, worse than nothing, he had left her with _Stormtroopers._

 _“May your genitals turn against you,”_ she cursed him in fierce Mandalorian under her breath (in case the Stormtroopers overheard and thought she was talking to them).

All she wanted was her damn credits so she could eat for awhile and maybe sleep a couple nights in a hotel where she wouldn’t get murdered. The frustration boiled under her skin, ran through her muscles like seething oil. So when some idiot and his buddies decided to jump her in the back street a few blocks from the fire, she almost laughed aloud with relief. The first guy, some Human with a ridiculous ill-fitting mask pulled haphazardly over his face, grabbed at her throat. His scream was impressively high-pitched as Jyn twisted his fingers backwards and slammed her fist down on his bent elbow. The joint cracked under her blow, and she jerked him sideways to block the incoming fist of his closest buddy.

The fight was brutal, bloody, full of the sounds of short screams and snapping bones, and in Jyn’s opinion, over far too quickly. It ended with three Humans puddled at her feet, two more howling as they bolted down the nearby cross street, and…a whip? Was that a whip curled limply on the ground by her foot? Jyn squinted at it, and then kicked one of the unconscious thugs over. Uniforms? They were wearing uniforms that – oh, right. Slaver. Shit, that bastard from the Markets must still be sending his friends to attack her. Well, that was just perfect. As if this whole job wasn’t already grating on her last nerves.

Movement in the corner of her eye, and Jyn drew her blaster from under her vest and spun –

\- and found herself face to face with a dark-haired Human in a leather jacket, his own blaster aimed directly at her face.

Jyn scowled, torn between the triumph of finding him and the fury of having a blaster pointed at her. He didn’t speak, simply stood there, watching her through narrow eyes. The light down here was shite, but better than it had been in the Spine. It made it easier to see his features, to mark the narrow set of his cheekbones, the hard line of his jaw beneath the scruff, the shadows in his dark eyes. Jyn jerked her head towards the unmoving figures at her feet. “Yours?”

His thin lip curled slightly in disgust. “Slavers,” he replied in a low, snarling tone (well, Jyn thought distantly, he’s got a nice voice, at least). “ _No._ ”

“Figured,” she shrugged, the end of her blaster never wavering. “You gave that bitch in the Heart Market a beautiful black eye.”

He arched an eyebrow at her, his own blaster steady as a rock in return. “‘That bitch?’ You mean Bradshaw, captain of the Snatchers?”

“The what?” Jyn stepped lightly to the side, further out of the street and closer to the alley opening next to her. As she suspected, his blaster swung smoothly to follow, although he didn’t move to block her.

“The largest slave-running organization in this sector,” he answered, his voice turning dark and rough with hatred again. Jyn felt a little shiver run down her spine. “Bradshaw runs the branch operation on this planet.”

“Hm.” Jyn pursed her lips thoughtfully, and slid a little closer to the alley opening (which took her a little closer to Greer, too, but he neither backed away nor moved to intercept, though she could see him marking her path). “Should have put a bolt in his head, then. Still, it was a nice black eye. Solid blow. Cracked his cheekbone, I think.”

She was close enough now that she could see the corner of his mouth twitch with what might have been humor. “How do you know that was me?”

“How did you know I was here?” Three more steps and she could duck into the alley before he shot her. Probably before he shot her. Depended on how good a shot he was.

“Heard the screaming,” he said mildly. And then the lines of his face hardened again, as if he had suddenly remembered what he was doing. “More importantly, _why_ are you here?”

Jyn snorted, sidled a little closer to the alley. “You first.”

“Stop,” he said coldly, the ice in his voice lancing out so sharp and sudden that it froze her in her tracks. Over the barrel of his blaster, his eyes narrowed. She was close enough now that she could see their color – a rich brown shade that gleamed with a warm gold tone in the yellow light of the streetlamps. His voice, however, was as cold and unforgiving as the deserts of Korriban. “Why are you following me?”

Jyn swallowed, her palms clammy, her heart starting to race. His blaster had stayed perfectly centered on her forehead this whole time, even when she moved. She was still two steps from the alley. She was fast, but her gut told her that he could kill her long before she made it. “What makes you think that I am?”

“Please,” he replied in a flat tone. “Don’t insult both of us.”

“You have my loot,” she snarled, because she couldn’t think of a good enough lie and anyway, she was tired and cranky and he was a huge pain in her ass. “I want it back.”

That seemed to startle him into a confused frown, though the blaster stayed steady on her forehead, damn him. “Your…loot?”

“Yeah,” Jyn bared her teeth, letting her very real anger buoy her fake confidence. “And if you burned it in your little gang war, I’m going to feed your arse to the k’lor’slugs, you rutting _shutta_.”

“I’m not a gangster,” he said, his frown even deeper now, and his tone taking on an uncertain note.

She poured the full force of her frustration into her glare. “So?”

And then, to her complete shock, he lowered his blaster. Just…just dropped his arm and flicked the safety on, tucked the damn thing back under his damn jacket (exactly where she thought he was hiding it) and then had the audacity to fold his arms and shift his weight to one leg like they were old buddies having a nice friendly chat and he was perfectly comfortable with it.

The abrupt shift in his body language, in his – in this whole situation, shit, threw her for a complete loop. Jyn found her own blaster drooping, pointing more at his knees than his head as she stared at him in astonishment. She jerked it back up when she noticed, and deliberately stepped once more towards the alley. He watched her with calm interest, his fingers tapping idly on his upper arm. “What,” she asked at last into the sudden silence between them, “the fuck?”

“I’m not a gangster,” he repeated, this time with firm emphasis. “And neither are you.”

She hesitated, considered darting for the alley and ditching his strange, obnoxious, far-too-knowing smug ass behind. “Uh, no,” she heard herself agreeing with him instead. “I’m not.”

“And you’re not a local.”

“Neither are you, genius.”

That provoked the smile again, the faint curve of the corner of his mouth. “No.”

Jyn glanced at the alley. Oh hells. This was probably a trap of some kind, but at the moment, she was armed and he wasn’t. It might be worth it, to see what he was driving at. She still needed her stuff, after all. She lowered the blaster, but didn’t tuck it away, ready to snap it back up at a moment’s notice. “So what are you, then?”

“Looking for someone,” he replied, and the smile dropped off his face. “I might be running out of time, and I can’t...” He cleared his throat. “You seem pretty good at finding people.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Help me find who I’m looking for,” Greer glanced down at her blaster, then focused on her face. The intensity of his expression made her heart clench, the hair on the back of her neck prickle. His eyes flicked around her face, as if he were marking every tiny freckle, every little scar and smudge and imperfection. As if he were committing her to memory. Jyn set her jaw stubbornly and stared back, deliberately noting the little nick on his left ear, the slight crookedness of his nose that meant someone had probably broken it once, the flash of his throat as he swallowed hard under her scrutiny.

 _That’s right,_ she thought with a smirk as she met his eyes again and saw recognition in them. _You’re not the only one who can play that game_.

“Help me,” he said softly, “and I’ll make it worth your while.”

“The Holdberdt vault loot,” she said firmly. “That’s my price.”

“The Holdb…ah. The smugglers in the East Arm of Iru.” His mouth curved up again – Jyn resisted the urge to demand to know what was so funny, definitely resisted the urge to smile back. He nodded. “Deal.”

Jyn considered her response, but before she could say a word, a mechanized voice buzzed from the other end of the street. “You! Drop the blaster!”

She had time to register Greer’s eyes going wide as he looked over her shoulder, but instinct kicked in, and Jyn bolted for the alley. Behind her, she heard the scrape of boots on stone, and the angry shouts of the Stormtrooper yelling for backup, but she didn’t stop to check where Greer might have gone. Shite, she was an idiot. Standing in the middle of a pile of bodies with a drawn blaster when she knew Stormtroopers were only a few blocks away? What the hells was wrong with her?

Greer, and his too sharp eyes, and his penchant for exploding buildings, and most of all his strange way of making bargains. That’s what.

Asshole.

It took her less than five minutes to shake the ‘trooper pursuit, but almost two more hours of moving through the Dead Gods before she felt safe enough to stop running.

That was day three.

When she woke up on day four, sore, tired, cranky, and with only a handful of credits left at her disposal, she decided that she hated him. Stupid stranger with his stupid vendetta against a bunch of stupid gangs and his stupid, stupid little smirk.

Greer probably wasn’t even his real name. No, on second thought, Greer _definitely_ wasn’t his real name. She’d bet her loot on it.

Which would be easier, if she fucking _had_ it.

Her joints popped and her belly rumbled as she worked her way through the crowds of Hossein’s Heart again, keeping her eyes peeled for a dark-haired Human who studied her face with far too much interest. She had no guarantee he would be here, but she didn’t know how else to track him down, short of slicing into every damn security camera in this mess of a city and searching through millions of scans for his corrupted scandoc tag.

Jyn eyed a vendor stand setting out steaming meat pies. She could still afford one, for now, but if this all fell through somehow, if Greer was just going to screw her over, she would need every single credit she could scrounge just to get off this planet. She took a moment to discreetly scan the holographic germ shield that protected the pies from sticky fingers. Yeah, she could slice through it, but the vendor stall was right in the middle of an open area in the Market layout. No way she would be able to pick up a pie and walk off without someone seeing, unless there was a massive distraction (and even then, two security cameras had the area fully covered).

Damn. Not worth it. She told her stomach to suck it up and deal with it, and turned her head away.

To find herself face to face with Greer.

“Good morning,” he said politely, pretending not to notice the way Jyn jerked back a step, her hand flying to her vest just over her concealed blaster. “Eaten yet?”

Jyn shrugged, fighting to keep her face neutral and her heart rate normal. A Chadra-Fan bumped into her back and squealed indignantly when Jyn snarled in response. When she looked back at Greer, she caught the tail end of a smile vanishing from his face as he deliberately wiped his expression blank. “You did that on purpose,” she accused.

“No idea what you mean,” he said placidly, and then walked past her. “Can you give me a moment before we begin? I’m a little hungry.”

Jyn watched him suspiciously as he strolled directly to the meat vendor and spent a few minutes haggling. Had he seen her checking the vendor’s security? Was he buying a pie now to mock her? Weirdly, he stood on the end of the cart instead of directly in front of it, so when the vendor shoved a pie – two pies – across the counter to him, she could see them the whole time. He scooped them both up carefully.

Definitely suspicious. What, was he going to stand right next to her and eat, grinning while her belly growled? If he did, she’s plant her truncheon right in his mouth, boga-fucker thief who stole her loot and blew up her leads and –

“Here,” he said, shoving one towards her. Jyn grabbed it reflexively, though she retained enough sense to hold it away from her body and scan it for obvious threats. Greer didn’t wait for her response, he bit into the other pie immediately. She looked up from the pie and caught him smirking at her, a smudge of red from the pie highlighting the upturned corner of his mouth. “No threat,” he said quietly, nodding at the pie. “Sign of good faith.”

Jyn’s stomach chose that exact moment to growl, embarrassingly loud.

If he laughed, she would deck him.

Greer didn’t even blink, his sharp eyes turned back to scan the crowd as he finished his own breakfast.

Well, if this was a trap, she could kill him later. If it wasn’t a trap…her stomach growled again.

It was a really good pie.

She was still licking her fingers clean when Greer suddenly jerked his chin towards a group of people moving through the Markets. “Metacarpal Mechs,” he said, turning to put his back to them and face her directly. He crossed his arms and leaned a little to the side, so she could see clearly over his shoulder. The group of five Humans and one Orishen all wearing a blue-and-black band somewhere on their bodies pushed through the Markets with deliberate purpose, angry and hunting.

Jyn shoved her hands into her pockets and relaxed her body deliberately, just another civilian in the Markets having a casual conversation. “They going to recognize you?”

“Unlikely.” He paused. Frowned. “But possible.”

“Word is the Mechs don’t run slaves.” Jyn watched as the five gangsters crowded around a nearby salvage merchant, although none of them seemed interested in the wares. There was a lot of emphatic gestures and a few snarls – the merchant held up his hands and cowered, unable to answer whatever questions they were asking. “Unless,” she continued thoughtfully when Greer failed to respond, “your buddy is a tech that they… _indentured_.”

“So I’ve heard,” he replied in a tone that she couldn’t quite parse. She held back the snort of derision. Okay, so he wasn’t going to give up any information that easily. Cagey bastard, this Greer. Well, it was worth the shot.

Jyn watched the Mechs move onward, heading with purpose to the west of the Markets. Without a word, both she and Greer started to stroll casually in their wake. They pushed through the bustling Markets, Greer drifting almost immediately to the far edges of the walkways. He was almost unnaturally good at slipping through gaps in the crowd, stepping in and out of the shadows of the shops in a way that made him hard to track. The security cameras scattered throughout the Markets never even flickered as he passed (not until Jyn came into range, anyway). No wonder he had been so damn good at evading her throughout the City. Like smoke, she thought with equal parts exasperation and admiration.

Every now and again, he threw short glances down at her, as if checking to see how she was handling his pace. Jyn made a show of relaxing her shoulders and her jaw, because hey, this was easy, thanks for asking. He wasn’t the only one who knew how to vanish. To prove the point, she side-stepped lightly directly into the path of a gaggle of chattering shoppers. She kept her eyes focused on the far end of the street like reaching it was her only goal in life, and her chin tilted downward. Just another pedestrian pushing her way through the crowd. The shoppers parted automatically around her, neither of her two marks noticing her fingers brushing delicately into their pockets as they passed. When she cleared the group and Greer came into sight again, she caught his sharp-eyed focus on her face snapping back into bland disinterest. _Too late,_ she thought with a smirk as she tucked both of her newly-acquired credit chips into her sleeve. _I know you’re impressed_.

“What I don’t get,” Jyn mused as she rejoined him, “is why you blew the headquarters.” Ahead of them, the Mechs shouldered and shoved their way through the crowds, and Greer kept his eyes firmly on them. She could feel his attention on her all the same. “Even if you didn’t find your friend, why the fire? Brought all those ‘troopers down on you.”

Greer was silent a long moment, long enough that Jyn tore her eyes from the gangsters to check his expression. “The droids they chop,” he said when he caught her gaze, “are still functional when they are dismantled.”

Jyn blinked. “Oh.” Technically legal, but then, a lot of sick shit was _technically legal_ in various places of the galaxy. Hell, slavery itself was perfectly fine in the Empire, even if they called it by prettier names. And droids weren’t legally considered alive anywhere that she knew. To rip them apart while still conscious, though. That was…

Her stomach twisted, and she shoved the thought away quickly. Nothing she could do about it. The galaxy was full of horrible things, and nobody was exempt, not organic, not synthetic, nobody. And there wasn’t a damn thing a loner fugitive thief with decent slicing skills and a right hook could do about any of it. The only thing _she_ could do was keep her belly full and her ass out of jail. And avoid the Empire, avoid anyone who might carry stories of her to a man in a flowing white cloak who smiled as he stood in the deep green grass of -

She shook her head sharply. “So you just happened to be in the area and thought you’d shut the Mechs down?” she demanded quickly, to distract herself. “What, you got a hero complex?”

For some reason, that made his eyebrows furrow, his shoulders tense beneath his leather jacket. He cleared his throat. “Hm,” he grunted after a beat. “Guess so.”

Jyn’s spine prickled. No, there was more to it than that.

 _Not_ , she reminded herself viciously, _my problem_.

Ahead of them, the gangsters crowded around another merchant, this one sitting behind a large bench covered in soldering tools and bits of metal. This merchant seemed a lot less intimidated than the last one, a big woman with heavy scarring on her face and bare right shoulder. She folded her arms and glowered at the gangsters, who were clearly treating her with a great deal more respect than they had shown so far. Jyn couldn’t get a good enough angle on them to lip-read their whole conversation, but she could tell that the merchant was unmoved by the Metacarpal Mechs’ anger. At length, however, she jerked her head towards the back of her small shop, and the gangsters followed her inside. A neon holographic sign popped up over the bench: _Closed For Meal, Back Soon._

“Okay, so, last known location,” she said flatly, intent on getting this job over with so she could finish her _other_ job and get paid. “For your friend,” she elaborated. “Last known location.”

“Right Hand of Zaim,” he replied, his body and expression relaxing back into cool disinterest.

Jyn rolled her eyes. “So you lost the trail.”

“They had him,” Greer said firmly. “I found…evidence. At the headquarters. But they moved him before I got there. Or…” He paused, looked away from her.

“Or?”

Greer cleared his throat. “Or he broke out. He’s not the type to…go quietly. There was some evidence of a fight before I got in there.”

Jyn hesitated, but there was no point in beating around the nebula about it. “They kill him in the fight?”

“I have no evidence of that,” he snapped.

Jyn held up her hands in surrender, because hey, not her business. If this friend of Greer’s was alive or dead or whatever, all she agreed to do was find him. And get her loot.

“If they moved him, there’s record of it in their finances,” Jyn said at last. She watched him carefully out of the corner of her eyes; some guys got violent when people pointed out their blunders.

“Which would be kept at the headquarters,” he completed the sentence dryly, without any hint of rage or offense. Before she could look away, his gaze slid sideways and caught hers, both of them watching one another sidelong. “Which are, I understand, now inaccessible.”

“ _Inaccessible_ ,” Jyn echoed incredulously. “That’s a fancy way of saying ‘burned to the ground.’”

“Not the ground,” he shook his head, his eyes creasing with humor now. “Burned to the sublevel.”

“Fine, burned to the sublevel, and _crawling_ with stormtroopers.”

“A single squad hardly counts as ‘crawling.’”

“So how many does it take before you consider it a problem?”

“A platoon, minimum.”

She made a point of looking him up and down, mock evaluating. “You’re that good, huh?”

He blinked at her, a deliberate slow blink that was weirdly endearing. He still wasn’t quite smiling, but the lines of his face were softer, sweeter somehow. “Better.”

“Right.” Jyn realized that she was staring a little too hard at his face, and shook her head. “Well, then. Gonna have to…” she made a vague gesture in the air, her thoughts in disarray. “They’ll have backups,” she finally managed, reigning herself in sharply. “The boss doesn’t live in the kriffing headquarters. They’ll have backups of all the people they own, especially the ones that put up a fight.”

“So we can follow the gang until they report to the boss in person,” he nodded. “But I need a faster route.”

Jyn dropped her voice under the babble of the crowd. “Worried about your friend?” She immediately kicked herself, because that was not her business, and he probably wouldn’t answer anyway. Who would give that kind of personal information away to a total stranger like –

“Very worried,” he said, just as soft. “I need to find him. Before I’m out of time.”

Abruptly, an image of two burning warehouses flickered through Jyn’s head, as well as a flash of something tight and painful in her chest. Jyn was no stranger to people hunting for her, but they were all enemies, monsters always clawing at her heels. Not a friend, ready to scorch the world on her behalf. This was…she had never imagined what it might be like if someone…and she wasn’t imagining it now. Shite. She had things to do. _Pull it together, idiot._

“So we find a faster way,” she said at last. She pointed at the shop where the Mechs still hadn’t emerged. “You know how to spoof a knocker program?”

Greer barely glanced at the flickering hologram over the shop’s apparently open and unguarded front. “That’s not just a knocker,” he raised an eyebrow at her. “It’s a triple scan hopper program.”

Jyn shrugged, and gave him a sly grin. “So use a grifter and synch it in time.” She raised an eyebrow right back at him. “You good enough for _that_ , hot shot?”

“A grifter?” He shook his head. “On a triple? A sharpside would be much better.”

“Not for running multiple attack processes simultaneously.” She nudged his arm with her elbow. “Use the grifter on a double-encrypted hardline chip, the hopper can’t keep up.”

“A double-encrypted hardline? Those are _years_ behind the standard,” Greer huffed, though the corners of his mouth were suspiciously curved upward. “It will never outprocess the datacore in a decent hopper.”

“That’s why you overclock the microframe,” Jyn told him archly.

Greer coughed into his fist. “I see. Not too easy on your gear, are you?”

“It’s perfectly safe if you know what you’re doing and keep tabs on how long the chip runs over.”

“So while I’m breaking in the front,” Greer asked, tilting his head and watching her from the corners of his eyes again. “Where will you be?”

Jyn pointed to the upper level of the red stone building, where a cracked window was just visible under a tattered black and yellow banner.

“That’s…” Greer eyed the narrow entrance, trailing his gaze to the completely exposed space out in front of it, then down to the bustling street directly below. “Daring.”

Jyn shrugged.

“And once you are inside,” he asked, “what was your plan?”

Jyn bit her lip, but if she was in this, then she was in it, and that’s all there was to it. She fished around under her shirt for a moment, and pulled out a flat, circular device half the size of her palm.

“Nerve grenade,” Greer stared at her, his eyes wide. “Seriously?”

Jyn frowned at him. “The exterior wall of the Screaming God Koo is seven meters thick,” she said pointedly. “I could see the moons through the hole you made.”

He ducked his head, his tongue darting out to flick along his lower lip. “Ah,” he said, and then his face cleared. “Right. Do me a favor, at least,” he continued in a calmer, unaffected tone. “Warn me before you set that jolter off.”

“I’ll be in before you,” Jyn assured him. “Clear out the Mechs, go through their pockets, find anything useful. You go through the merchant’s records in the front of the shop, find out how she’s connected and what she knows.”

“And if my friend is here?”

“The jolter won’t kill him,” Jyn tucked the nerve grenade into her pocket, for easy access. “He’s there, you pick him up off the floor, we get out, and you pay me. And then we go our separate ways and never see each other again,” she finished firmly, because that last bit was important.

Greer nodded. “Alright.” He glanced up at the window, and then back at her. “There might be a small…issue. With my friend, if he’s there.”

But Jyn was tired of standing around, tired of studying the lines of his face and wondering how genuine they were, and definitely tired of not having her loot and being off this rock. “Sort it out later,” she waved him off. “Let’s go, before the Mechs leave and we have to start over.” She reached out and plucked his comm link from his inner jacket pocket before he could react, and tapped in a local frequency that matched her own comm. “Call me before you walk into the back room,” she said, shoving the link back into his pocket.

He moved quicker than she expected, catching her wrist and arresting her hand with her fingers still partially in his jacket. “Call you?” he asked softly as Jyn froze, her urge to wrench away at odds with her instinct not to make a scene in public. (In the back of her head, she noted that his grip was softer than expected, gentle around her wrist as if he were taking care not to hurt her, although why he would do that, she didn’t know). “What, exactly, should I call you?”

Her heart was suddenly, inexplicably beating far, far too fast.

Jyn swallowed around the dryness in her throat. “What have you _been_ calling me?”

A confused little wrinkle formed between his eyebrows, and Jyn’s free hand twitched to reach up and smooth it down. Which was ridiculous.

Greer looked at her for a moment (too close, she realized with a jolt, but it was too late to move back, moving back now would signal weakness, fear). “Fox,” he said at last. “I’ve been thinking of you as…Fox.”

It took her a minute, and then she almost laughed. “Fox and Greer,” she smirked at him. “From that holoshow? About the…what, the rogue detectives? Running around, solving crime together?”

He shrugged. “You were tracking me around the city, and now we’re going up against a gang. It seemed appropriate.”

Jyn thought about it. She had three different idents on her person at this exact moment, she could fake a couple more in a pinch. But hells, no need to burn any of them in this job, if he was willing to give her a new one. “Okay,” she said. “Fox. That works.”

And then she flipped her wrist inside his too-gentle grip and caught his jacket, yanking hard to draw him close to her. His body kept her other hand hidden from the crowds around them, and Jyn leaned up close so that her mouth was pressed against his ear. He automatically grabbed her hips to steady himself, and Jyn jammed one leg between his to give her knee a clear shot at his crotch. She felt him register the possible blow, his thighs tensing on either side of her knee and his body twisting slightly to the side to offset her strike. He had some close-quarters training, then, enough to both feel her possible attack and to note that she wasn’t taking the opportunity. If he’d been less trained, he would have flailed away from her, tried to escape. As it was, he simply stilled, his hands tight on her hips, his heartbeat thundering against hers.

To anyone watching, they probably looked like a couple exchanging a loving embrace.

Jyn tilted her free hand between them, and let him feel the edge of her vibroblade pressing lightly against his gut.

“If you betray me in there,” she whispered harshly in his ear, “The next time you turn around, you’ll find my knife in your fucking heart.”

Slowly, he nodded, his short beard scraping lightly against her neck. Jyn started to pull back, but Greer’s arm snaked around her waist, jerking her back. “If you sell me out,” he murmured against her throat, and twisted her body against his so that the barrel of his hidden blaster dug into her ribs ( _damn_ he was good, she hadn’t even noticed his other hand sliding up to grab the weapon under his jacket). “Or if you harm my friend.” The barrel dug a little harder against her side. “You will never see the shot that ends you.”

Jyn nodded. “Deal,” she grated out, her throat tight and her breath short.

“Deal,” he agreed, and then he let her waist go, pulled back, and pressed a brief kiss to her cheek, warm and soft and over before she could even really process what he was doing. “See you later, _darling_ ,” he said loudly, and then strolled casually into the crowd.

“Yeah, later, _precious_ ,” she snarled back after him, although she was almost sure he didn’t hear it over the market noise.

She resisted the urge to swipe at the warm spot where the touch of his lips still lingered, in case anyone was watching.

Her heartrate was still too fast. Shit.

But she didn’t have time to sit around waiting to get the hell over it. Greer was winding his way around the market square, headed in an indirect line for the shopfront where the gang had disappeared inside. Jyn turned sharply on her heel and marched into the narrow gap between a nearby vendor and the curving stone wall of the Heart Markets. Once out of the main thoroughfare, she shimmied up the mess of pipes that ran throughout this part of the Dead God, carrying the water and refuse from one part of the statue to another, and made it to the upper level, on top of the two-story shops. One of the support walls for the Weeping God ran along the middle of the Heart, and this one just so happened to curve up and over the back of the shop she was targeting. Greer’s mistake, she thought as she low-crawled in the space between the shop ceilings and the curving wall, was to assume she would climb _up_ to the window.

Instead, when she reached the highest peak of the support arch, she ran a quick scan for any cameras, and checked over the side for any watchers (none, of course; this wasn’t the kind of place where people looked up). Then she dropped down directly behind the banner over the shop’s upper window. It took her less than ten minutes to reach it, and the window wasn’t even armed with any traps or alarms. All she had to do was jimmy the lock with a small metal pick and slide it carefully open.

She slipped into the dim room. Muffled voices below the floor. The murmur of the crowd outside. The gentle click of the window swinging shut behind her. No immediate outcry, no alarms. Good. She was in. The upper apartment of the shop was clearly the merchant’s living space, a bed shoved into the far corner, a small kitchen squeezed into the other. But the rest of the space was occupied with random piles of metal, a table covered in various tools, and a giant Imperial security droid.

Wait, a giant –

A heavy metal hand clamped around her throat, and Jyn scrabbled desperately at the droid’s grip, but it was useless, shit, she was caught, she was _dead_ -

“You are not supposed to be in here,” the droid informed her, watching her dangle in front of him.

Jyn gasped, her lungs starting to burn, her throat aching, and kicked outwards with her heels. Her blow landed square in the droid’s chest, staggering him just enough that she could leverage her swinging weight and wrench herself loose. The droid dropped her to the floor onto a thick rug, and she tried to roll as much as she could to avoid making a great bloody crashing noise. If the gang below heard the ruckus and came charging up the stairs, she was going to have to fight them all in very close quarters, with a giant fucking _Imperial droid_ in the mix.

A giant fucking Imperial droid who was now standing silently between her and the window. “You,” he said again, “are not supposed to be here.”

Jyn’s hand flew to her blaster, and she drew it in one smooth motion, aiming it at the droid’s main processor – just up and to the left of the center of it’s chassis. At least, that’s where it was in a standard model. But a standard KX droid would have kept trying to capture or kill her. This one just…stood there. Slouched, actually. Since when did Imperial droids slouch?

“I am not supposed to be here either,” the KX droid informed her. “But at least I was invited.”

Jyn blinked, still coughing a little, and reached up to massage her throat with her free hand. “What?”

“Heta invited me to be in this room. You came in the window, and I highly doubt Heta gave you permission.”

This job was just getting weirder by the second. Next time, she thought a little sourly, backing up as far as the small room would allow, she was just going to slice into some rich hotshot’s bank accounts and flee the planet before she could get caught. A risky job, but certainly less likely to involve dangerously charming arsonists or malfunctioning KX droids. “Who is Heta?”

“Heta Kandar,” the droid said, a touch impatiently, as if she was being deliberately thick. “The droid mechanic who owns this shop. She purchased me from a gang known as the Metacarpal Mechs.” The droid’s white optics telescoped on Jyn. “If you plan to steal me back, don’t. I am much bigger than you, and I don’t want to go.”

Below her, the muffled voices suddenly flared louder, an argument of some kind.

“I don’t want to go with the gangsters either,” the KX droid said firmly. “If they attempt to reclaim me, I will resist. You should go, if you don’t want to get caught in the crossfire.”

“Crossfire?” Jyn checked the droid carefully, but she saw neither a weapon compartment nor any modified parts that indicated a built-in blaster. “You don’t have any way to shoot back, do you?”

“It is a general term,” the droid seemed to slump a little more than before. Jyn got the distinct impression that if droids could breathe, this one would be sighing. “I meant that I will attack them.”

Jyn’s back was against the door now, though she didn’t dare drop her blaster and grope for the door release. Behind her, the voices were a lot louder, angrier. Shit, where was Greer? Was he in the empty store front, running through the merchant’s records? Had he already found his friend, and abandoned her to deal with a pissed off gang in one direction, a dangerous droid in the other?

The droid turned to look at her collar. “You are getting a message.”

A second later, her comm buzzed lightly against her throat. Greer. Shit. It buzzed again, insistent, and Jyn fumbled for the button. “Problem,” she hissed the second she felt the comm go live. “Withdraw.”

“Too late,” Greer murmured in her ear, as serene as if they were on a lovely picnic. “They heard me, sent a guy out. I’m hidden. Waiting him out.”

Jyn clenched her jaw. Then she had no choice. The only way out was through either the droid or the gangsters. Her nerve grenade was useless on the droid.

“Hey,” she said, and forced herself to lower her blaster, pointing it at the floor. “A bargain.”

“Who…?” Greer whispered in her ear, and then trailed off; the Mech on patrol had probably moved too close for him to risk speaking. She ignored him. He could figure out what was going on himself.

“Are you trying to bargain with me?” The droid stared at her, his chassis whirring softly. In her ear, she thought she heard Greer hiss, a soft sound quickly swallowed up. He must have recognized the voicebox of a KX unit. She wondered briefly what he thought of the nonstandard vocabulary program the droid was running.

“Yeah,” she answered, tucking her blaster away despite her own screaming instincts. If the droid thought she was a threat, he could cross this small space before she could get a shot off anyway. “The Mechs, they have something I need. Information. You want them to piss off and leave you alone, right?”

“Are you suggesting I help you attack them now? That might mean harming Heta. I would prefer not to do that.”

Jyn shrugged. “Sure. We’ll take them out the hard way. I’ll leave her alone.”

The droid considered her. “Very well,” he said at last. “I will help you, and you will let me punch the kidnappers.”

The…what? Jyn shook her head, because hells, she didn’t have time to deal with it. It was enough the droid was willing to help. Although if ‘Heta’ then told him to turn on her…

“Before we go down,” she said, holding up a hand, “you want me to take out the restraining bolt?”

The droid stared at her. “The restraining bolt,” he repeated carefully, as if the words did not quite compute.

Jyn scowled, because the arguing voices had dropped to muted again – the gang might be preparing to leave. They didn’t have _time_ for this. “I assume it’s internal,” she gestured impatiently at the droid’s chassis. “I can pull it out. Then you don’t have to listen to your master anymore. The Mechs won’t be able to grab control of you, either.”

“Yes,” the droid repeated slowly. “A restraining bolt is required in my model.”

Jyn stared at him. Was he damaged? Maybe the Mechs had already stripped out some important cognitive processors.

“Hey, you!” A new voice grated over the comm. “What the hell are you doing in - ?”

A heavy thump, a groan, and then Greer said calmly in her ear, “I’m blown.”

The muted arguing voices went silent, and then started to shout, moving towards the front of the store.

“Shit,” Jyn grunted, and then threw open the door and thundered down the stairs. To her mild surprise and concern, the KX thundered after her.

Jyn burst into the lower floor to find Greer completely surrounded by five angry gangsters, one of them lunging for his throat as she watched. Greer moved fluidly around the man, his elbow flying up and landing a vicious blow to the attacker’s throat, another blow to his sternum less than a breath after. It was both savage and graceful, and Jyn allowed herself half a second to admire the way the gangster choked and dropped to the ground.

And then she launched herself at the nearest Mech’s back, her weight striking him squarely between the shoulder blades.

It was over very quickly, probably because the KX droid picked the largest of the Mechs up and flung him directly into the remaining two. Jyn knocked her target out with her truncheon, Greer kicked his own hard enough in the balls to knock the man into next week, and the three on the ground were out like lights before the KX droid had to make any kind of follow up.

“Hey!” The tall merchant woman growled from the doorway, “The fuck was that all about?”

“Apologies, ma’am,” Greer said politely, turning to smile at her. “But I believe you have my droid.”

Jyn glowered at him, because that was a fake smile if ever she saw one. The merchant, Heta supposedly, seemed to like it. She straightened and smiled back. “I take it you are Cassian, then, honey?”

Greer winced slightly, and shot a pointed look at the KX droid.

“I’m sorry,” the KX said loudly. “I was disoriented when Heta switched me back on.”

“He was a bit of a mess when I bought him from the Mechs,” Heta nodded. “Poor baby had some wires crossed. But I got him working again, no trouble. I was going to put up a lost and found notice later today, actually.”

“Thank you for taking good care of him,” Greer – Cassian? – smiled that fake Nice Boy Next Door smile again. “Is there anything I can do to compensate you for your time and materials?”

“Oh no, no,” Heta waved her hand at him, her cheeks taking on a bit of a pink tinge. “No, it was no trouble, and I couldn’t just leave the lad in their clutches, could I? The Metacarpals have no damn respect for well-made droids. They just think in credits, the fools. It was a pleasure to meet K2SO. A pleasure, honey. Go on, you two get home now. And the door’s always open if you want to swing by and say hello!”

“Before we leave,” the KX said loudly. “I made a bargain with the thief. She will need to search the bodies.”

“Thief?” Jyn cringed as Heta turned to glare at where she had been standing silent and forgotten in the corner. “What _thief?”_

“Ah no, there has been some misunderstanding,” Greer intervened. “This is my associate, Fox. She has been helping me track down my droid.”

Jyn nodded, kept her face carefully blank, and tried hard to look like someone a nice man like Greer would call an ‘associate.’

“Your associate,” K2SO repeated, in the same slow way he had said _the retraining bolt_. Jyn’s neck prickled as she made the connection, but there was no way Greer was running around an Imperial-run city with an unbolted _Imperial security droid_ , was there?

“Yes, Kay. Fox is my associate,” Greer said firmly, and then smiled again at Heta. “My apologies again for sneaking in, but we did not know how you were tied to the gang.” He kicked one of the unconscious Mechs and held out his hands in a sheepish, disarming shrug. _Such a silly mistake_ , his body language said. _We were so wrong to doubt you_ , his smile told the merchant.

Heta laughed and flapped a hand at him, as if he were a darling nephew and she was fond of his little jokes. “Oh, of course, of course, how could you have known, honey?”

Jyn rolled her eyes.

“We should leave,” K2SO said abruptly.

“No need to rush off, Kay,” Heta turned to smile at him too. “In fact, I was just about to set up some lunch, if you lot are – “

But Jyn had caught a glimpse out of the shop window front of what the droid must already have seen, and she darted forward, grabbing Greer’s arm and yanking him hard to the side. The blaster bolt that sailed through the open shop front burned a black hole in the wall where his head had been.

To his credit, Greer didn’t stumble longer than a second in her grasp. “Heta, get down!” He shouted over Jyn’s head, his voice no longer pleasant and affable but clipped and commanding. It was the voice of someone used to command, even in chaos, and the merchant responded immediately. She dropped out of sight behind her counter.

Jyn didn’t have time to see what the woman did after that, because she and Greer were already moving out of the shop and into the busy street, the big droid stomping close behind.

The crowd scattered as another shot whined from the shadows of the nearby alley, and then a mass of uniformed people burst onto the street.

Their leader sported a massive black eye, a recently broken nose, and a whip.

“Bradshaw,” Greer told her in that clipped voice as they made a sharp right and dove into the nearest cross street. It put a few buildings between them and the slavers’ blaster barrels, but they couldn’t dodge through the Markets forever. Already a distant siren told her that Stormtroopers would be descending on this place in response. And the thunder of feet and cacophony of angry shouts rising over the shrieks of the Markets crowd told her that the slavers were giving enthusiastic chase.

“You seem to have made many new _associates_ while I was gone,” K2SO said behind them.

“You’re still his favorite,” Jyn snapped over her shoulder, trying to get a glimpse of their pursuers around his hulking black body. A blaster bolt flashed over his shoulder and scorched through a flickering sign on a nearby shop, sending a shower of sparks down over her head. Jyn shook her head hard to dislodge any sparks that might have landed on her hair, but didn’t pause.

“Up!” Greer shouted, tugging on her hand. “Go _up,_ lose them in the Head.”

“Troopers up there!” Jyn shouted back, tightening her grip on his hand and using it to pull him to the left instead. “Some idiot started a big fire up there and they’ve been crawling all over it.”

Greer grunted, and out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw him flash a grin at her. “How many?”

“A platoon.”

“Damn,” he said mildly, dodging around a squawking Omwati who threw a bucketload of apples into the air in shock as K2SO nearly bowled her over. Jyn caught herself grinning back at him, and snapped her head around because now was _not_ the time, what the hells was wrong with her?

A series of shots whistled past them and burned an uneven pattern in the walls of the tram station.

“Are you crazy?” Greer bellowed as she towed him up the platform and towards the nearest tram. “We’ll never –“

“Trust me!” She shouted, cutting him off.

His hand jerked a little in her grip, but he didn’t let go.

They barreled into the open tram car just as the last off-boarding passenger cleared the door. The operator cabin was open, and Jyn felt a surge of relief mixing in with the adrenaline. _Finally_ , a little luck on her side! The conductor stood in the open door, staring at them with her mouth hanging open.

“Hey!” She protested, jabbing a finger at the three wild-eyed intruders. “You can’t bring a droid in here! What are you – “

Greer reached her first, his longer arms giving him an advantage on Jyn. His fist lashed out and caught the woman square in the gut. She gasped and bent over, clutching her middle. Jyn grabbed her by the shoulders, twisted, and launched her towards the droid. K2SO picked her up as if she were a sack of feathers and carried her to the door, where he dropped her unceremoniously on the platform.

Angry shouts and blaster shots roared into the station, only barely louder than the screams and sirens that suddenly erupted as the slaver gang arrived in full force.

“In!” Jyn latched onto Greer’s jacket sleeve and dragged him into the open cabin. “Come on, come on!” She waved furiously at the droid and then turned to the cabin controls. The door to the operator cabin snapped shut bare centimeters behind K2SO’s chassis. A second later, Bradshaw and several of his slavers burst into the tram.

“Fox - ” Greer snapped, his blaster out and aimed around his droid friend at the glass window in the cabin door. K2SO shuffled awkwardly to the side, presumably to give Greer a better line of sight, but the move brought him uncomfortably close to Jyn’s back. She ignored it, like she ignored the press of Greer’s hip against hers. This cabin had definitely not been designed for two grown Humans and a flipping KX droid, but there was enough room for her to work, and that was all that mattered.

“Door is bolt-proof,” Jyn told him without looking up from the controls. The tram shuddered into life and whined as she rammed the speed up as high as it would go.

Behind her, she heard the muffled sound of multiple shots, thudding uselessly against the cabin door. A second later, something heavy slammed against the door, making the already shaking tram sway wildly on the electrified rail.

“Is it Wookiee proof?” K2SO asked. “Because they have a Wookiee.” Another heavy thud rocked the tram. K2SO’s chassis whirred, almost directly next to her ear. “A big Wookiee.”

“Plan?” Greer’s voice was tight, but from the corner of her eye, she could see his aim was steady as a star on a clear night, centered on the massive pile of fur and teeth barely an arm’s span away.

Jyn finally found the latch to the maintenance panel on the control console, and ripped it open. Ah, just like she thought, a speed limiter wired into the throttle. A quick yank, and the whole thing came away in her hand.

The tram shuddered again, this time hard enough to make the shouting slavers stagger out in the passenger section. With a worryingly high-pitched whine, the tram engine spooled higher and the transport began to rocket along the rail, faster, faster. Around the huge Wookiee, Jyn saw Bradshaw pull his whip free from his belt and snap it sharply. An angry red line appeared on the shoulder of the slaver nearest him, and then another on the leg of the Wookiee. The bolt-proof door muffled the sounds too heavily for her to pick out words, but whatever he was saying didn’t look complimentary. The slavers all cringed away from their raging boss, and Jyn took a deep breath, turning back to the panel.

“Hang on,” she muttered, gripped the edge of the console. “This might get rough.”

“There is nothing in this space that will support my weight, should I become imbalanced,” K2SO informed her primly. “Even with my superior gravitational servos, if you shake us hard enough, I might fall over and crush you.”

“Do your best, Kay,” Greer muttered, his blaster still trained on the slavers. The rocking of the tram had him struggling to stay upright, though he was keeping his gun admirably steady. Jyn shifted her weight slightly to press harder against his side, giving him something brace against. He leaned back instantly, his face grim but his grip still easy on the blaster. The man had training, that was clear.

Training in weapons, explosives, Imperial surveillance tech, and judging by his reaction in the merchant shop – command.

Not a trader, the thought slipped quietly under the terror and the calculations running through Jyn’s head. Someone who knew how to fight, how to give orders, how to get around the Empire. What the hell was he?

 _You know exactly what he is_ , a gravelly voice from her long-dead past snarled in her memory. _You’ve met his kind before. Do not lie to yourself, child_.

Jyn glanced up at the man staring through the tram door with the distant, calculating eyes of a sniper picking his target, and reluctantly allowed herself to name him. _Rebel._

The tram suddenly filled with glaring golden light, flaring into her eyes around Greer’s sharp jawline. They had cleared the Weeping God, and were now bouncing precariously fast over the far desert floor.

“Look, Cassian,” K2SO said. “A k’lor’slug.”

“Brace,” Greer replied flatly, and a moment later the tram shook again as the Wookiee slammed into it with a howl. The faint sound a whip snapped again, followed by another mighty thud. The door groaned.

“Dented the frame,” Greer told her, his voice detached and impassive. “One or two more, and they’re in.”

Another snap of the whip, another bellow.

“The leader does not seem much nicer to his officers than his slaves,” K2SO commented.

“Brace,” Jyn said, wrapping one arm around Greer’s waist, using the other to simultaneously slap the power off and the emergency brake on.

The tram screeched to a halt, a spray of hot sparks filling the windscreen, the momentum making the car bounce alarmingly on the creaking rail. The jolt threw Greer’s weight against her arm at a painful angle, but she held on grimly to both him and the console. Her shoulder ached, but then Greer twisted in her grip and flung both arms around her, bracing his feet wide and steadying them both as the tram rocked wildly around them. Jyn twisted to catch him, her stomach flipping as the tram groaned again and swung heavily on the rail. The momentum threw her sideways into the console, bruising her hip against the edge. She bit off a whimper as pain lanced through her leg, and didn’t resist when Greer pulled her hard against his body, away from the panel.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the droid watching them with glowing optics, standing upright as easily as he had on stable ground.

Out in the passenger car, the slavers were all on the floor, either on their knees or prone on the floor. One of them appeared to be hugging the nailed-down legs of the bench. Jyn grimaced as she peered through the window around Greer’s shoulder – hopefully he didn’t have a strong grip. She didn’t want to sit out here for too long, or the Stormtroopers would just load up a shuttle and land right on top of them.

The tram bounced one more time, the rail creaked and groaned almost as loud in her ears as the hammering of her heart. And then the arc of the tram car gentled, gravity no longer shifting too fast to balance.  A breath later, they were hanging relatively still over the empty space between the Dead Gods.

“And now?” Greer murmured, his arms tight around her back, his cheek pressed to her hair. His warm breath cascaded down the side of her head, curled around her ear, and brushed the exposed skin of her neck. Jyn shivered before she could stop herself, and told herself the flush in her face was the terror, not...not anything else. There was nothing else. He was just…so warm and solid around her, and anyway she didn’t want him to go sailing through the cabin door when she slammed the transport to a halt, right? It was natural to reach for something to hold on to when the floor was unreliable. Jyn realized with an ugly jolt that she was clinging to him with both hands now, leaning hard into that warmth like it was hers to claim. To her shame, she was practically nuzzling her face against his shirt, her eyes squeezed closed, her ear pressed over his own pounding heart. Her skin felt tight and shockingly sensitive all over her body, her nerves raw.

She scowled at herself. _Nerves._ That’s what it was. That explained her stupid, dangerous reaction to him. Nerves and adrenaline and _hells_ , it had been awhile since anyone had held her, that was all.

She swallowed hard, composed her face, and pulled sharply back. Greer let her go immediately, but to her mixed fury and pleasure, he didn’t step away.

“Whatever you are going to do,” K2SO said over her head. “You should probably do it. The Wookiee is getting up.”

Jyn turned back to the panel. Right. Wookiee. Slavers. Possible incoming ‘troopers.

Her body felt cold where he had been pressed against her.

The faint sound of a muffled shout.

“He doesn’t seem to realize that you can’t hear what he’s saying,” K2SO told them. “I can, of course, but Humans can’t adjust their auditory sensors to filter distortionary- “

“The Wookiee’s backing up for a run,” Greer cut him off.

Jyn found the lever she was searching for. She grabbed it, turned to look over her shoulder, and found Bradshaw glaring directly at her, whip in hand, face red with blood and rage. There was revenge blazing in his eyes as he looked at her; at his hands, he promised her silently, there would be chains and horror and a slow, painful death. He raised the whip, and next to him the Wookiee lowered his furry head and bellowed.

Greer stepped between her and the tram window, his blaster in hand again, cutting off most of her view of Bradshaw and drawing the slaver’s gaze. It was possible that he could get a single shot off after the door shattered and before the Wookiee struck him, but the space was too small, the Wookiee too big. No matter what, Greer would be mowed down by the rampaging slaver.

Bradshaw snapped the whip. The Wookiee barreled forward. Greer raised his blaster.

Jyn slammed the lever down.

The tram shuddered one last time, and then the floor of the passenger cabin dropped open.

The door was so thick, she almost couldn’t hear the screams as the gang plunged down towards the distant desert sands. Distantly, she noted that the slaver clinging to the chairs didn’t, apparently, have much of a grip at all.

The operator cabin was silent, save for the harsh breathing of two Humans, and the faint whir of a droid’s processor.

“Emergency passenger ejection,” K2SO read over her shoulder. “An interesting feature in public transportation.”

Jyn peeled her white knuckled fingers from the edge of the console. “No shit,” she muttered, swiping her palms against her trouser legs, pressing hard to hide the slight shake in them.

Greer was still standing a few centimeters from her back, close enough that she could feel his body heat. Jyn would have leaned away, but she was sandwiched between him and the console. When he took a deep breath, she could just barely feel his back brush against her own. “Okay,” he said softly, possibly more to himself than the others. “Okay. That’s done. We need…” He cleared his throat. “We need to move.”

“Hang on,” Jyn reset the ejection lever, and the floor outside the battered door slowly creaked closed. She reached for the throttle again, but Greer’s hand was suddenly on her shoulder. She jumped, cursing, because she hadn’t felt him turn around behind her.

“Wait,” Greer said softly over her startled growl. “Hossein is closer than Zaim. Send us back that way, and we can lose any patrols in the Markets crowd.”

“They’ll lock down the Markets, if they haven’t already,” she argued, but she switched the tram direction and trundled them as fast as she dared back towards the Weeping God.

“But many will already have left, and there will be a lot of onlookers and media around the edges,” he countered, his voice too close to her ear, his body too close to her back, just too close, too close. “We can get clear of the crowds without notice, and I can get you what you need.”

She was not going to lean back. She didn’t _want_ to lean back. It was just nerves. A near-brush with death messed up people’s heads. Jyn was way too smart for that.

“What I need,” she repeated dumbly, sounded just as slow and careful as K2SO when he lied.

“Your, ah, _loot_ ,” he reminded her, and she could swear she actually heard the soft half-smile in his tone.

Her loot. Right. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? Why she had dragged him along when the slavers showed up, instead of bolting on her own to hide. He had her stuff. Of course.

“Fox,” Greer said softly, and the fake name was a damn near caress that she felt all down her spine. Briefly, she wondered what it would feel like if he ever said her real –

And that was enough of that.

Jyn twisted and sidestepped. “You better have it,” she snapped, a little harsher than intended.

Greer stayed very still, watching her through his eyelashes.

“Yes,” he said at last.

The tram rumbled into the station, still going too fast. Jyn slapped the emergency brake on again and braced hard against the console, although the stop was much less terrifying than it had been when they had been moving full speed. She braced her feet and breathed through the shock of the abrupt stop. Greer rocked as the tram gave one last protesting screech, but K2SO held out one arm and allowed the Human to steady himself until they finally, _finally_ were still again.

She could already see a flash of white armor at the far side of the station. No time to sort anything out here, then.

The cabin door was bent too out of shape to open properly, but before she could panic (or even really register it), K2SO jammed his metal hands into either side of the metal and yanked. The door screeched in one final protest, the bolt-proof glass cracking cleanly down the middle, and then he tossed the freed door through the shredded opening.

“Come on,” Greer said, his voice clipped and commanding again. Jyn bit her lip, but more white armor caught the corner of her eye, so she followed him out of the tram without comment.

There was a huge crowd outside the station, most of them turned towards the Markets, and only reluctantly backing away as ‘troopers set up crowd barriers along the blaster-burned road from the Markets to the tram station. Jyn, Greer, and K2SO walked casually into the edge of the crowd, moments before a ‘trooper started buzzing at the crowd, a repeating litany of Move Along, Clear The Road, This Is An Official Investigation.

Jyn didn’t ask Greer where he was leading them, and he didn’t offer the information. Even K2SO was strangely quiet as they moved through the gradually emptying streets towards the far shoulder of the Weeping God. For a terrible moment, she thought he was going to walk into the next tram station they passed, the one that would carry them out to the spaceport of the Fallen God Sha. She stretched her legs to pull even with him, and bumped him with her shoulder, glaring when he looked down at her.

Greer’s eyes flicked from her hard stare to the tram station ahead, and then the shadow of a smile softened his blank expression. He raised an eyebrow at her, and then turned at the last minute down a side street that ran in a curve around the station. Jyn snorted, and stuffed her hands into her pockets.

She didn’t fall back behind him, and he didn’t stretch his legs out to pull ahead.

Which meant nothing at all.

At last they ended up standing in front of a small inn, the sort of place a small-time trader might stay on a business trip for a day or two. Greer gestured to the side alley, and K2SO stomped into the shadows. Jyn watched the droid shuffle to the back of the short space, turn, and then his white optics dimmed. He was barely visible from the street, and not at all from inside any building around here.

All the same, Greer tensed as he watched his…well, his friend, she supposed. Considering what he’d just gone through, and what he clearly had feared might happen if he didn’t move fast enough, Jyn figured the tension in Greer’s shoulders made sense.

She pulled one hand from her pocket, and prodded him in the ribs.

Greer startled, tearing his eyes from the droid to look down at her.

“He’ll be fine,” she said, aiming for short and curt. To her disgust, her voice came out much softer than intended. Greer’s thin lips softened in kind, some of the tension in his shoulders easing.

“Thank you,” he said quietly, although whether he meant for her halting comfort or her help in recovering K2SO was unclear. Not that it mattered.

Jyn cleared her throat. “My loot,” she said, a little too fast.

“Right,” he nodded, and led her inside.

His room was on the second floor, with good sightlines of the street through the window and a fire escape that would give him easy access to both the roof and the street. There was nothing in the room save a cheap bed and an unremarkable green duffel bag tucked almost out of sight under it.

Greer dropped to his knee and pulled the bag out. Jyn stepped close to the door, her hand resting lightly on her vibroblade in her belt. Just in case.

“Here,” Greer opened the bag and pulled out a small grey box. He turned to face her, still on his knee, and flipped the box open.

A necklace made of glittering Bosph starcrystals shone softly at her from within the dark velvet case. A flawless crystal almost the size of her thumb gleamed with the colors of the rainbow in even the poor light of the cheap room. Above the starcrystals, four earrings so rich a green they looked almost unreal glowed faintly.

Jyn flipped out her datapad and scanned the jewelry. Genuine. Worth a fortune to the right fence. Ugly as sin, in her opinion, and way too gaudy, but there were people who would pay stupid amounts of money for these shiny bits of old metal and rock.

She tucked the datapad away and nodded. Greer pushed up to his feet, and snapped the case closed, and tossed it to her. She snatched it from the air and whisked it into her jacket, tucked into the special harness she had worn just for this case.

“Why did you even bother?” She asked as she tightened the harness strap. “The Holdberdt gang didn’t have any hand in the droid trade.”

“Ah.” He coughed, and a faint red tinge colored his ears. For the first time since she met him, Greer seemed caught entirely off guard. “Well.”

Jyn narrowed her eyes. “What?”

“I, ah, wasn’t actually trying to rob Holdberdt,” he confessed slowly. “I was just looking for information on…something else. Something for work,” he shrugged as if this was entirely unimportant. “And xe was my best lead. But when Kay went missing, I realized that Holdberdt was the one who sold Kay’s location to the gang that took him. So I…took a detour through xir office.”

“You robbed xer for revenge?” She laughed, because picturing calm, self-controlled Greer robbing a gangster out of spite was hilarious. “Never would have pinned you for petty, hot shot.”

Greer blinked, and then shook his head as if clearing it. “Hm,” he shrugged, turning away from her. Jyn eyed him, confused by his strange reaction. A moment later, however, he glanced at her over his shoulder and gave her a helpless sort of smile, spreading his hands in self-deprecation. It was a less fake version of his Nice Boy Next Door act that had so charmed Heta the Merchant before. Jyn hated to admit it to herself, but she could see why it had been so effective then.

It was pretty convincing now, too.

“You’re not really one to talk,” he said with mild admonishment.

Jyn raised an eyebrow at him.

“Leading a screaming gang of slavers through the Markets.” He raised one hand and ticked off his fingers. “Stealing a tram. Nearly derailing that tram hundreds of meters off the ground. Dropping a load of slavers screaming into the maw of a k’lor’slug. Crashing the tram back into the station you stole it from.”

“Just a damn minute,” she growled, when it looked like he was preparing to continue. “First of all, I didn’t have a choice about the market chase thing. And I didn’t _crash_ the tram at the end. It was a hard stop. And anyway,” she crossed her arms and scowled at his expression, because he had no business smiling at her like that, and she had no business feeling…things…when he did. “Anyway, you definitely should _not_ be lecturing me on subtlety, Greer.” She rolled her eyes at his overly-innocent expression of fake confusion. “You rampaged around this city like a bantha high on methamphetamines, but you don’t hear me bitching, do you? And you know why, hot shot?” she demanded, her skin starting to feel tight and oversensitive as his smile grew just a little bit wider.

“Why is that?” he asked, tilting his head in a way that made her fingers itch to reach out and touch the soft scruff on his jaw.

“Because _I_ am a nice fucking person,” she snapped. “That’s why.”

He laughed, a quiet sound that he half-swallowed, but not before it rolled through her chest and straight down to the root of her spine. She braced her feet and breathed through it, just like the crash – _the hard stop_ – on the tram.

“Fox,” he said suddenly, his smile fading into something more serious. Jyn tensed, but held still, waiting. He’d earned at least that much from her. “I’m not – “ he paused, his tongue flicking along his lower lip as he clearly resorted his words and started over. “My job,” he started, stopped.

“Not a trader,” she supplied helpfully, since he was struggling to fill the gap.

“No,” his gaze sharpened and focused on her. She suppressed the shiver that ran down her spine. Fucking nerves.

The silence stretched between them, and she wondered what was stilling his tongue, making it so hard for him to tell her the truth when he clearly intended to.

She opened her mouth, then realized she didn’t know how thin these walls were, and closed it again. She didn’t want him to get arrested or executed or anything. He was a pain in her ass and he made her think stupid, dangerous thoughts, but she didn’t want him to be hurt on her account. He treated the droid like a person, like a friend. He didn’t try to cheat her out of her loot, or leave her hanging against the slavers like he probably could have, if she was being honest. He was a decent person. She didn’t know many of those, but she remembered what it was like when she did.

Greer was looking at her face again, intent as if he were committing her every freckle to memory. For some reason, it made her think of the tram, of his arms around her back and his breath on her skin. Warm. Steady.

Safe.

Fuck it.

Jyn strode across the room, grabbed his shirt, and yanked. Greer didn’t even stumble, he simply shifted close and wrapped his arms around her again, pulling her in tight. Jyn leaned into him, her cheek against his chest, her hands wound tightly in his shirt under the jacket.

He pressed his face into her shoulder and held her like she mattered, like he would scorch the world to see her safe.

It might have been a lie, but it was a damn good one. Jyn closed her eyes and just for a moment, she let herself believe.

She turned her head and let her lips brush the hollow of his throat. “Rebel _,_ ” she whispered into his skin.

He swallowed, and his fingers dug harder into the muscles of her back. He turned his head until she could feel the scratch of his beard against her neck. “Cassian,” he murmured.

She exhaled, long and slow, waiting for her heart to even out again.

He let her go the moment she pulled back, but he didn’t move away.

“Goodbye, Cassian,” she said quietly into the space between them.

He was looking at her, eyes dark, close enough she could see his pulse fluttering in his throat, too close and too warm and too inviting.

She could almost see it, in her mind’s eye. She could lean up and he would tilt his head again, like before, lean down and she could almost feel what it would be like against her lips. Warm and soft and safe.

The last time she had felt safe, she had been a teenager, who turned around and found herself alone in a war zone. Before that, she had been a child running through the grass of her homestead while a strange shuttle appeared on the horizon.

Jyn stepped back.

Cassian didn’t move.

“Goodbye, Fox,” he said softly, his voice low and gentle and so understanding that it spiked through her chest like a blade, like a spear, like he had reached directly into her body and ripped out a small piece of her to keep. He said goodbye like he understood exactly why he had to say it, and when she met his eyes again, she knew that he did.

Jyn spun on her heel, and ran.

It didn’t matter, she reminded herself as she burst from the inn and turned towards the distant space port. Her heart roared in her ears and the weight of the vault loot pressed tight against her ribs, and she sucked in the stale air of the Dead Gods as she ran to escape them. It didn’t matter what he understood about her. It didn’t matter that he was warm or quiet or funny or safe. Not safe. No one was safe. Those other things, maybe, but not safe. Shit. It didn’t matter if he knew her, though, or understood her. It was over. She wasn’t going to think about it, because there was nothing to think about. She would never see him again.

For a long time, she was right.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, the title is from the poem 'Ozymandius,' because how could I not get a reference to that poem in this story somewhere?
> 
> No, the City of The Dead Gods is not canon. I just looked for a "desert world" and hit on Korriban, which has a significant Sith history, according to wikipedia. Somehow this translated to "giant statues of gods from a dead religion, big enough for people to live in."


End file.
